Hidden, Fragmented and Unconnected

A few years ago I met with a client who was on his way to Houston to buy robots for his company in the resources sector. I informed him that he should buy Australian and I showed him the Scale of the robotics industry in SEQ and his response was "Sorry, the robotics industry in Australia is invisible, fragmented and has no supply chain".

Ouch! Since then I have been on a quest to address this problem.

The first task was to expand the scope of the analysis to the entire Australian innovation ecosystem and the nature of our knowledge value chains. This of course underpins the conversation on the lack of collaboration between research and industry (see Build Bridges across the Valley of Death ). What I found is a general recognition that Australia is good at invention put poor at innovation - and our innovation ecosystem is hidden, fragmented and unconnected [1].

Innovation in Australia is Hidden

This is the subject of my article Innovation in Australia . Most of the general public are not aware of our innovation ecosystem - the companies, departments, organizations, networks, funding, people or products, and how it all fits together. Even our innovation awards are eventually hidden - see Where have all the awards gone ?

Innovation in Australia is Fragmented

This is mentioned in Roy Green's Urgency of the industry task ahead

Australia’s approach is notoriously fragmented and undirected. In 2015, a report which I was commissioned to undertake for a Senate inquiry on ‘Australia’s Innovation System’ found that Commonwealth spending was spread almost randomly over 13 portfolios and 150 budget line items, few of which connected with each other.

Innovation in Australia is Unconnected

This is mentioned in John Howard's Challenges for Australian Research & Innovation:

The current approach to industrial strategy is nether mission-oriented or strategic. It is an aggregation of largely disconnected funding programs, policy documents, and announcements

The need for connectivity is in the Key challenges to innovation in Australia ?

The Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO) detailed two features of a highly functioning innovation system.?First, high levels of connectivity between businesses, government and research organisations to facilitate the stocks and flows of knowledge. Second, high levels of R&D talent within organisations that absorb new technologies and developments.

If we look at the recent $280B commitment in the US - Dueling theories of innovation -?

The ideal discovery-to-innovation pipeline is not a pipeline at all, but a web of linkages between scientists, industry, government, and investors. The “web” approach, in contrast to the traditional linear model, takes full advantage of feedback loops among actors and processes.?

With the downside

An effective web approach requires constant experimentation and is very dependant not just on the quality of the nodes in the network but the?strength of the connections?among them

This is the most significant problem for Australia - we might have some excellent nodes of R&D but the connections between them are either non-existent, weak (unfunded) or ephemeral.

So how can it be fixed?

How can we create an ecosystem that is visible, integrated and connected.

Australia needs to develop its own Digital Innovation Infrastructure.

We tend to ignore the importance of this Digital Infrastructure (software) for the creation of ecosystems.? I like the term?Digital Innovation Technology (DIT)?from the book?Think Play Do: Technology Innovation and Organization :?

To help me navigate my own ecosystem I created the diagram below a few years ago.

It is centred upon the Future of Work in Manufacturing - and the relationship between IMCRC, AMGC, ARMhub and our RIC (Robotic Innovation System). It was prepared for a presentation that I gave to AIG on Reimagining Work in Advanced Manufacturing Unfortunately, using a manual tool to construct this map did not scale very well, so a few years ago, I played around with a product called KUMU . This is a visualization platform for mapping systems and better understanding relationships - here is a draft of Australia's National Innovation Ecosystem - it is just a mock up, but used to create the figure below.

Looking around, I found that CoreHub have been using the same tool.

One of the biggest challenges with creating an ecosystem is?capability?discovery.??This issue was recognised back in 2015, with the?NISA report ?where Data 61 was commissioned to develop?Expert Connect Global ?with the aim of connecting companies to experts (it has since been shut down). But this was only half the problem. The other problem is the reverse, getting researchers to find industrial capability. We a need a more holistic approach.

A few years ago Chad Renando created a A map of the Australian Innovation Ecosystem 2.0 which listed Australian Startups - which led to the website StartupStatus [3]

Another interesting digital platform is the?RED Toolbox ?- the Regional Economic Development (RED) Toolbox. This is a national platform for supporting smart, connected and sustainable regional economic development. This has been funded by RDA and Austrade, and for a brief time, supported by CSIRO.

Internationally, there are a number of initiatives.

• OECD Policy Instruments Database
• European Cluster Collaboration Platform
• Note - More to be added.

Why the title photo of lightning

There are two views of innovation.

• Technology Driven - We have an invention (from which we have spent money) and we try and find a market problem that it solves. The problem with this approach is that we may have?technology for which there is no market.
• Market Driven - We find a market problem (from which we can make money) and then source technology to solve the problem (innovation). The problem with this approach is it is not able to develop technology for new or emerging markets.

So which one should we choose? This is a False dilemma. If we visualise the technology as the ocean (the technology pool - the ocean of ideas), and the market as the storm clouds (where the $$ are - market forces) :?Question: In which direction does the lighting strike??The answer is both , but not at the same time.

So the real challenge when developing a national strategy: "Can we get lightning to strike up and down at the same time and meet in the middle". In other words; can we modify?the resources we have (the technology) and?shift or shape the target market in an iterative manner to deliver a path from invention to innovation. It is my understanding that this is the role of the Product Manager - to keep the development of the technology on target to a shifting market and within the innovation pipeline.

References

[1] The word is unconnected rather than disconnected, because disconnected refers to a chain that was once connected. I don't believe that our KVC has ever been connected.

[2] Mapping an innovation ecosystem using network clustering and community identification: a multi-layered framework

[3] Systems and platforms for mapping and measuring innovation ecosystems: Australian and global examples